Bahala

The Current

I woke up in a bungalow.

The sun had just peaked in through the window, reflecting off the tiny pool of drool that had slipped from Aaron’s mouth onto his frayed blue pillowcase. I laughed silently, and walked over to shake him awake.

Together we whipped up some eggs, toast and black coffee. We sat silently, as usual, and ate our breakfast on the front porch of the tiny house, hidden away in the trees. Enjoying the sound of silence.

Aaron laid out a plan to explore the east side of our island. It was the weekend, and I figured that after we satiated Aaron’s need to adventure we could stumble into a new area with new bars and drink and dance just confidently enough to find someone to fall in love with for a couple of days.

We struck out into the little village. Each local we passed looked a little gaunt, a little tired, which may have just been the reflection of our hangover. About three quarters of the way between our bungalow and the village center we veered onto a small dirt path that led through jungle, framed by mountains in the distance.

We walked for a couple of hours over leaves and tree roots — Aaron leading the way, cutting through lush green underbrush with a rusted machete that he had picked up in the village. I noted that our path through the forest seemed to endlessly curve slightly left. It didn’t seem intentional, so I made a note to give Aaron some shit about his ‘expert navigation skills and sense of direction’ later at the bar.

‘Shhhh.’ Aaron had stopped and put a finger to his lips. It was a couple of voices, male and female. We made knowing eye contact and treaded carefully in that direction.

But apparently not noiselessly. ‘Hello!’ said a smiling, confident baritone, the sound meeting us at the edge of the clearing. The voice’s owner was in mid-turn towards us and away from a feminine figure whose face was blocked by his long, curly locks of hair. He was tall, dark-skinned and angular-muscular, with a well-maintained thick black beard. ‘I’m Mikkel! Come join us — want a beer?’

Aaron and I looked at each other in one of those overstimulated, in-need-of-a-bailout looks, which our new friend mistook for a yes and sprung away towards a small, windowless house about 100 feet up a small dirt path. Despite being late afternoon, the house was almost completely shadowed by a canopy of trees. It stood on wooden stilts 10 feet above the ground, and backed up to a rocky mountain face.

But while Aaron’s eyes followed Mikkel, mine were drawn like a magnet towards where he used to be. There, under a wooden skeleton of a structure that looked like it may have one time held a tent, was the most stunningly, naturally beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was dark-skinned like Mikkel, with long-flowing, curly black hair. Her features were round and full, kind, and immensely powerful. She had me immediately.

I opened my mouth with nothing to say, but needing to say something, and started: “You are the div–“

“Bahala,” she interrupted graciously, with laughter in her tone and in her eyes. I smiled, sheepish.

Mikkel broke the spell for a moment by gliding back into the clearing with an armful of cold drinks in brown bottles. He ushered us into a messy circle of large tree trunks under the wooden structure. I drifted towards the place beside Bahala, who welcomed me warmly with a soft look and a smile.

Mikkel led us into easy conversation. He was the most personable guy that I had ever met — one of those charismatic types that could have made a fire-and-brimstone preacher, or at least a politician.

As it turns out, he’d come close to being both, at different times. He had been born in the strange, windowless house we saw behind him, grown up there. Enterprising even as a child, he had learned from businessmen, clergyman and other local leaders on the island, before finally choosing joy and returning home to live a simple life.

Bahala waded through Mikkel’s story, quietly but powerfully. She and Mikkel had grown up together, had always known each other. She explained that she worked as a nurse, tending to physical and spiritual needs of the local community. She didn’t seem to feel the need to draw a clear line between these needs.

I couldn’t help myself but steal longing gazes at Bahala as she spoke. She returned my gaze without turning her head, seeing me with the corners of her eyes and an omniscient smile.

While Aaron continued to ask Mikkel questions, I took my opportunity. “So, Mikkel,” I asked, “is he… is he your brother?”

“Yes and no. Not by blood. But to answer your real question, no. We are not together.”

I looked down. I was jealous of Mikkel, I knew that — but in a way that confused me. In some ways, I sensed, I would rather be Bahala’s brother than her lover, too.

I realized I had no idea how long I had been staring down at my feet, and raised my eyes back up to Bahala. She was still looking at me, smiling. She laughed, and her lips turned into crescent moons. Dark, warm light shot from her eyes and her mouth and lit the circle around her.

‘Woah,’ I said under my breath. I had seen that — the moonlight emanating from Bahala, which had now settled around her in a hazy glow. I lifted my hand in front of my face and the same blue-purple light framed each finger, shimmering, outside of my control.

‘Let’s dance,’ said Bahala. She grabbed the hand in front of my face and pulled me up towards her. Before I knew it I was dancing, spinning in circles, laughing.

I realized that it had turned to dusk. I glimpsed the shapes and shadows of other dancers who had fallen in around us, but I couldn’t make out faces through the glow that encapsulated Bahala and me. I had no idea where they had come from, but I simply didn’t care. I felt a small wave of nausea hit me, but I simply didn’t care. Bahala and I moved together — everything else was inconsequential periphery.

I only stopped for a moment when I caught a glimpse of Aaron. He was standing facing the windowless house. The smoke from his cigarette melded with the hazy energy that surrounded him.

I reached out for his shoulder, and missed. He turned anyway.

“Aaron… are you feeling this?”

“Yes.”

“Something in the beer?”

“Probably. I don’t care.”

I laughed and turned back to Bahala, seeing her smiling and bathing in light. I took one step towards her when my knee buckled, and I crashed to the forest floor.

The Center

I woke up in a dark room.

Where the fuck was I?

Bewildered, I looked towards the only source of light. I was just in time to see Bahala leaving, a thin sliver of light cutting across the room from where to door was cracked open. Her warm eyes met mine, just for a moment, before disappearing as the door snapped shut.

The room fell into pitch blackness. A lock clicked. I heard a loud hissing sound, like an airlock closing.

I sat there, in blackness, dread welling up and hanging from my lungs like a dark anchor. Bahala… She had locked me in here. And now I was completely alone.

When the courage came, I got up from my cot and began probing around the dark room, walking in the direction of where I had seen the door close. After a minute of stumbling, I felt a string of cool, beaded metal hit my face. I pulled, and a dim bulb hung from the ceiling clicked on, barely illuminating the space around me.

I looked around. It was a small, wooden room with two twin mattresses in opposite corners. The ceiling jutted up in the far-right corner of the room, making space for an old wooden staircase that led up to a bright red door about six feet above my head.

I turned and tried the front door with one hand, then two hands, and then the full weight of my shoulder. It didn’t even think about moving. “Fuck.”

Where was Aaron? Selfishly, I needed him right now — his strength, his logic. He would help get us out of this mess. I just needed to find him.

I walked over to the cot in the far corner of the room. The mattress looked completely unperturbed. I gave it a quick kick, and dust floated up. No one had slept in this room with me the night before. I felt that anchor in my stomach grow heavier. Was he dead?

“Well, only one option now.” I walked over to the staircase in the far corner of the room, put one foot forward onto a rickety old wooden step, and began to ascend. When I reached the top I took a deep breath, grabbed the knob, and pushed.

The Oasis

I stepped into bright sunlight. It hurt my eyes, and I squinted as they adjusted.

“That’s impossible.”

The dark house had backed up to a mountain, but before me now stretched a broad oasis. Light from the sun beamed in through a lush canopy, illuminating a breathtaking, patchworked forest. Pine trees stood next to thick forest cedars, which stood next to palms with thick vines hanging from them like loose jewelry. The air tased thick and sweet, and buzzed with energy and life.

But the colors… The colors. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Bright red roses, to light pink peonys, to shockingly bright mangos and bananas hanging from the trees. The colors extended on in every direction, up a brightly lit path to my left, and a trail through a thicket of tress off to my right. The colors from one object bled seamlessly into the next, flowing into one another, creating new hues that I had never seen before. I raised my hand in front of my face, and saw that same, light purple energy around my fingers I had seen surrounding Bahala and me the night before.

I hear a loud ‘thud’ from behind me, and whirled around to see the red door slam closed. There wasn’t even a handle on this side.

I sighed and turned back towards the oasis, even in the moment realizing I was less upset than I should have been. I breathed in the colors and the palpable energy of the place. A joy sprang up inside of me like a fountain from a deep well, washing over the dread I had felt just moments before. I laughed out loud, in spite of myself.

But wait — Aaron. Maybe he had made it through as well?

I looked both ways, then stumbled left down the sunlit path in search of my friend.

I gazed out in every direction as my legs propelled along the path, on autopilot. Everything I saw amazed me. An iguana started as a light yellow at the base of a tree, then began to change colors as it climbed, molting into a light pink, then a deep purple, then a blood red orange, before disappearing into the canopy above me. I realized that I had lost — or never really had — all sense of time and distance travelled.

As I stumbled into the next clearing, a massive hawk with deep orange coloring unfurled its wings about 50 feet away from me. It took off from its perch, and I noticed that an orange-silver aura flowed from its feathers, like contrails from a plane.

I followed the hawk as it disappeared around a bend in the road, where the path turned sharply to the left to accommodate a large boulder. I picked up my pace and followed — as I rounded the bend, the ground to the right of the path dropped down into a stunning valley of hazy green and orange. A river, deep blue with impossible streaks of gold, snaked through it.

“Hey man!” I snapped my head forward along the path and saw that it led to plateau ahead of me. It held a manmade wooden structure with a knit beige awning, under which stood a large stone table. And on the other side, seated casually on a tree trunk with his legs crossed in front of him, was Aaron.

Letting Go

‘These are some mighty fine drugs they gave us, aren’t they?’

I couldn’t help myself — the joy I had felt on my hike turned to pure elation, and I ran forward to greet my friend.

‘My god, am I happy to see you.’ I stopped just short of Aaron and plopped down across from him. He wasn’t the hugging type. ‘And — yes.’

‘Sorry about leaving you back there. When I woke up you were passed out cold on that cot. And you know me,’ he smiled broadly, ‘when I see a big red door, I have to open it.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Fuck if I know. Seems like forever.’

“What did they do to us? It feels like they dropped 10 tabs of acid into that beer,” I said.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about that. It feels like an acid trip — those colors, the shimmering edges, losing track of time. But we slept last night, and it feels like I’ve been here a decade. Nothing I know is this strong for this long.’

I nodded.

‘I think it’s this place, man. It’s impossible. And as big as it looks… I did a full lap around on that path, and no matter which way I seem to go it always leads back to that red door, this beautiful valley, and this stone table. I think it’s some kind of infinite loop.’

I shuddered.

‘But what bothers me the most is the sky. It seems like we’re in an open valley, but look up.’

I scanned over to the closest mountain, where rock met the sky. I began to make out an almost imperceptible haze that blurred what laid beyond. I traced it up overhead and realized that it didn’t end — it extended over us, like a film of thick, translucent soap.

‘We’re in a contained environment.’

‘Yeah, appears so. It seems like some kind of energy field. Everything beyond it is hazy — I haven’t seen a cloud above it, a bird fly through it. Nothing.’

We both sat there for a while, a bit more claustrophobic than before.

I looked over at Aaron. He had fooled me at first — his quiet confidence and nonchalant tone had made me think that he was calm and in control. Now, I could see that he was visibly agitated. His teeth grinded, his knee bobbed up and down, and the fingers of his right hand drummed absentmindedly on the stone table in front of him.

‘Calm down, man. Deep breaths.’

His fingers stopped drumming, and shot up to start to playing with the cowlick on the front of his dirty-blond hair.

‘I fucking hate it here. Sure, everything was pretty at first. But there’s nothing to do here. Nowhere to explore, it just leads back here. We’re alone!’ He laughed, eyes wide.

I turned to face Aaron head on. He was manic — it was something I had seen before. But even beyond that, something wasn’t quite right about my friend. He had a faint red aura around him. As I looked closer, he appeared almost translucent — I swore I could see the outlines and colors of the leaves behind him.

‘Can we just sit here for a while and get our heads screwed on…’

‘Why the FUCK are you looking at me like that? How are you so calm? I knew you would do this — I knew you would like it here.’ He stood up abruptly from his stump. ‘I’m going to go find a way out, I can’t stand this and I can’t stand you right now. I’ll be back in a couple of days, hours, eons, whatever you use to tell time in this fucking place. This is not a cry for help — don’t follow me.’

Aaron was prone to anger, but I had never seen him like this. There was something unsettling, even hostile in his voice. When I thought about it for a moment, it made sense. I had known him for a long time, and Aaron’s favorite things in life were moving forward, growing, gaining ‘positive life momentum’. He was robbed of his passions in a place like this.

And as much as I hated to admit it, he was right about me. I loved it here. Ever since I had stepped into the oasis, a newfound joy and serenity had been growing like a sunflower in my chest. Even now I felt it expanding, tendrils of light reaching out and connecting to the think waves of energy that I felt around me. Despite being ‘alone’ in the oasis, I felt no loneliness. In fact, I felt more like myself than I ever had in the outside world.

I saw Aaron’s back moving away from me, through a thicket of trees, away and down to the right following the path. There was nothing that I could do now. I closed my eyes, breathed in deeply, and let him go.

The Moonlight

I woke up to see that the sun had gone down in the valley before me.

A faint, blue moon shone overhead through the haze of the oasis energy field. But I wouldn’t have needed this light to see — everything around brought its own light with it, in the form of a deep blue-purple energy that hummed around each creature and tree, and around my hands and fingers.

I saw a faint red gleam on the ground ahead of me, and walked over to inspect it. The red mark was in the shape of Aaron’s hiking boot, but it wasn’t a print. It was more like a small pool of energy, sitting just above the ground. Like ectoplasm. I looked forward, and noticed a clear path of red marks ahead of me that curved gently to the right into the distance, before disappearing beneath a thicket of trees and brush. I followed.

That same hazy glow that I first experienced dancing with Bahala surrounded me, and I weaved back and forth across the trail of red markers. It took me a moment to realize that I was surrounded by fireflies. They blinked with a bright, light-purple brilliance that brought tears to my eyes. They grabbed my attention just long enough for my boot to grab a tree root and send my sprawling forward through a thicket of bushes.

I found myself lying face down in the dirt. I put my hands down in pushup position besides me to raise myself up, but froze before the muscles in my arms could engage. There, lying about 50 feet away from me on the other side of a small pond, was a panther. It was easily 250 pounds, muscles slightly tensed in curious anticipation. Eyes forward, staring at me.

In the moment I knew I should be experiencing a sharp fear, a rush of adrenaline preparing my body to escape. But it simply wasn’t there. I took a moment to admire my new master. She was a sleek, jet-black, but like everything in this place, her fur shimmered with an energetic blue-purple. Her eyes were two perfect, glowing, hollow moons. They stared into mine, past them, examining what lay underneath.

I took a deep breath, then slowly raised myself to my knees. The panther seemed to stretch, and bring herself up to a crouching position. I planted one foot firmly in the earth and stood up. Across the pond, the panther raised herself up to a full standing position. My breath caught in my throat. She was magnificent — beautiful and fierce, silent and powerful. Chaos made animate.

We stood there, eyes locked across the crystal pond, for what seemed like an eternity.

A strange sound off somewhere to my left broke the spell. I turned to look. It had come from somewhere behind a thicket of tress and underbrush. The red markers went off in that direction. I took a deep breath. Somehow, I knew what stood on the other side of those trees.

When I turned back to the clearing, the panther was gone. The only thing that remained was my reflection, looking back at me from the crystal pond.

I smiled. Then I turned and walked in the direction of the red markers.

Losing Aaron

I stepped out of the trees and realized that I recognized my surroundings. It was the clearing where I had first entered the oasis. I had completed a full loop, emerging from the thicket that had first stood off to my right when I had first emerged through the red door.

But the scene had changed. In place of the door wavered a red, vibrant, undefined pool of energy. A portal. It must have opened a couple moments before, making the sound that had brought me back to this place.

Aaron stood facing the portal. Or what was left of Aaron — I could now see right through him to the flower beds beyond, colored red by his energy.

I watched as an ethereal, dark-skinned arm extended out of the portal. Aaron looked back at me with a soft, sad smile, just for a moment. Then he turned to face the portal again, grasped the forearm with his hand, and pulled himself through. The portal snapped shut behind him, leaving the red door again in its place.

I slumped down to one knee. Then, I turned bck the way I had come and crossed my legs, my back to the red door.

Aaron was gone. This place… it had absorbed him.

But for some reason, even in the face of tragedy, that strong, serene feeling that had been welling up inside of me since I first entered the oasis clung to me, and I to it. There was a stillness there that had settled into my heart, my lungs, and my stomach.

I closed my eyes and breathed into the stillness. The back of my eyelids, instead of blackness, reflected a deep purple hue that seemed to emanate from somewhere deep inside of me.

Becoming Bahala

“Aaron.” A soft, strong voice came from behind me.

Remaining seated, legs crossed, I smiled to myself. Yes, that was my name — Aaron. It always had been.

Yet, I had never been this person before. Not the one who was sitting here, at this point in time, at the entrance to this magical oasis.

I gathered myself, stood up, and turned.

“Yes, Bahala?”

The portal was open again, this time pulsating with the same deep purple I had seen behind my eyes. Bahala stood before it, facing me. She smiled.

“This part of your journey is over, Aaron.” Her words came slowly, deliberately — it seemed to like hundreds of other voices were layered beneath hers. “You came to us imbalanced, a reflection of the world you live in. Too masculine. Too much your forefathers. Too much my brother, Mikkel.”

I took a few steps towards Bahala and the portal as she spoke. The closer I moved, the more crackling energy seemed to emerge from the portal and encircle Bahala, obscuring her face from view.

“Mikkel is sunlight — strength, logic, and discipline. He brought you and your world progress and plenty. But, unchecked, Mikkel is greed, suffering, and inequity — a malignant disconnection from humanity. That is how you came to us.”

I inched closer still. The hundred voices began to coalesce — I heard three now: Bahala’s, Mikkel’s, and my own.

“I am Bahala, the Divine Feminine. I am moonlight — empathy, power, and rebirth.”

As a took my final step towards the portal, my head down in reverence, the voice turned to one. It was Bahalas, and it was mine. Startled, I looked up at the portal. The face reflected back to me was Bahala’s, and it was mine.

“Now, you are Bahala. You are balanced. Go back into the world and do honor by us. Go complete the loop.”

I stood there for a moment, before the portal, looking at my reflection. A panther before a crystal lake.

I smiled, a soft, sad, knowing smile. Then I lifted my foot and took a step forward, into myself, and back out into the world.